Among the stories told in Vicksburg about the Sisters of Mercy is the one about Sister Isabel’s garden.

On the east side of the convent, off Adams Street, it bloomed with such a jumble of flowers, it was said, because Sister Isabel routinely tossed handfuls of seeds willy-nilly from the windows of the convent’s fourth floor.

Now the garden and a small brick building nearby, about which few if any stories have been told, are being restored.

Many city residents, generations of whom attended school in the city-block complex built and occupied by the Catholic order for 161 years and now home to the Southern Cultural Heritage Foundation, have no idea that the little building was a garden of another sort — believed to be the city’s first food pantry — tended by another nun, Sister Xavier.